Children of Night.(movie director M. Night Shyamalan)

Man may be in doubt whether to deem himself man or beast, but much of pop culture seems to have figured him -- or at least the male half -- out once and for all. From Maxim magazine to television's The Man Show, adult men are typically portrayed as animals who desire little more than food, sleep, and sex. The "stud," in reality the most pitiable of beasts, has become the archetype of masculinity. Strangely, both conservatives and feminists tend to accept this understanding, and differ only to the extent that they think maleness can be overcome. Feminists recommend extinction, arguing that men should become just like women, whereas conservatives favor domestication, arguing that men need incentives, lacking in an era of sexual latitudinarianism, to provide comfort and protection. Neither side considers that perhaps it is not maleness that is the problem, but its own crude notion of what maleness is.

Happily, however, pop culture sometimes matures faster than the intellectuals. M. Night Shyamalan's recent trio of films (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs), whose box-office success has earned him the honorific "The Next Spielberg," depict men as neither prisoners of marriage and family nor satisfied animals unperturbed by love, death, God, or doubts about who they are. According to Shyamalan, men are very different -- and more noble -- creatures than many today would have us believe.

Perhaps, then, it is necessary that his movies be so unabashedly, even determinedly, lowbrow. They have none of the rhetorical smirks by which screenwriters signal to their fellow Ivy League graduates that, of course, nobody really believes this stuff, before delivering the block- bluster entertainment that the audience expects. The 1990s saw the creation of a new cultural category -- deliberate camp -- as if excellence were neither possible nor, ultimately, desirable. In quiet rebuke of this trend (in some ways, The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable were harbingers of the post-9/11 consciousness), each of Shyamalan's movies visits the tropes of popular mythology without embarrassment. The Sixth Sense is about, well, ghosts, who act just as we imagine they do, sometimes leaping out and scaring us, restless and angry but not really meaning any harm. Unbreakable tells the story of two comic-book characters, a hero and villain with complementary super-powers and weaknesses. Signs depicts aliens, naked green humanoids that try to take over Earth and harvest its inhabitants. Even Shyamalan's favorite cinematic devices, such as not showing the monsters on screen until the end, are comfortably routine (while still making our frightened imaginations run amok). He makes movies rather than films, entertainment rather than art, and, just in case anyone misses the point, he names Jaws and Star Wars in interviews as his favorite movies.

This attachment to pop culture is not mere caprice, nor even in the spirit of epater les intellectuels (although, having studied film at New York University, Shyamalan surely knows something about what nettles les intellectuels most). Rather, Shyamalan has recognized that we express our deepest longings through the mythopoetic impulse. As one of the characters in Unbreakable says of comic books, "I believe that [they] are a form of history that someone, somewhere felt or experienced [before] those experiences or history got chewed up in the commercial machine, got jazzed up, made titillating for the sale rack." While some conservatives have, often quixotically, turned to high culture to preserve and revitalize civilization, Shyamalan has turned instead to popular storytelling; he is Alexandre Dumas to their Matthew Arnold. Mindful that Arnold saw high culture in part as a substitute for religion, we might wonder whether Shyamalan has the better of the argument.

Indeed, as many commentators have noticed, Shyamalan's movies treat religion with a sympathy rarely seen in Hollywood. To be sure, they do not betray intimate familiarity with any particular religion, nor do they illustrate elaborate theological ...